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Tag Archives: wellness

To live an organic life is to consciously minimize the amount of harmful chemicals that are in and on your body, around your home, and in your day-to-day life. Living an organic life initially takes a bit of effort because chemically fuelled products are cheaper and faster to make and they yield more profit. The six biggest corporations that control what you see in the supermarkets don’t want you to eat organic so organic choices are hidden from view, and go unpromoted.

If you’ve found yourself thinking, ‘I really want to eat organic’ or ‘I want to be an ethical consumer’ but you don’t know where to start, these 5 Unusual Ways to Live a More Organic Life should set you on your way.

How do you bring organic produce into your life? Know a great website that sells organic stuff? Got an amazing D.I.Y organic life hack? Care to share your favourite organic recipe? Please share your thoughts in a comment!

1. Educate yourself.

As I said, the big corporations don’t want you to have information about chem-free alternatives. There is no profit in it for them. The internet, however, is a wonderful thing, and these days, you can do lots of research and digging (‘scuse the pun) about eating organic. When you educate yourself, and use your own knowledge and wisdom, you are better equipped to make the right choices for yourself and your family. I recommend the following websites that will give you a great foundation about why you should live organically, and how you can get started:

It’s not just meat and veg that is better when it’s organic. Many unexpected products contain ingredients that grow in the ground, and if it grows in the ground then it can be organic! What’s the most unexpected organic product you’ve ever seen?

3. Grow your own: even if you live in an apartment!

There are lots of nutritious and delicious foods that you can grow right from your own windowsill! Garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms, potatoes, leafy greens and many types of beans grow wonderfully indoors. Growing your own is cheap, satisfying and healthy – you become a producer instead of a consumer, and you know where your food has come from. Growing veg indoors is a great way to get kids interested in eating organically. I remember my grandpa’s spare room being overrun with juicy, plump tomatoes when I was a kid- it’s one of my most magical memories! Visit The Real Farmacy to get started growing your own veg – even in an apartment!

Coaxing a child to eat veg can be a tough job – especially with so many brands offering crap to your kids via catchy adverts and shiny wrappers. One good way to encourage a child to eat veg is to include him or her in the growing and cooking process. Let your child help you make dinner, make it a family affair filled with love, and your child will be happy to eat what you made together and will associate eating veg with happiness and love.

4. Aim to talk to the person who produced your food.

Of course, if you live in an apartment you won’t be able to grow all your own food. The closer you can get to the person who does grow your food, the better. Farmer’s markets and food co-ops are great places to meet the person who has the very important task of feeding you and your family. What are their methods? Do they farm/produce organically? Ask them questions until you are satisfied with the answers. Part of the consumer problem is that we often don’t know – or care – where our food has come from. Us consumers are so far removed from production that all sorts of bad things can go on behind the scenes of production without anyone questioning it. And we unconsciously endorse it by paying for it.

The best way that you can live a more organic life is simply to vote with your money. Whatever you buy, you endorse. When you consume an item, you validate its production. The power is in your pennies! Some people complain that buying organic is expensive. That may be the case compared to ‘beef burgers’ that cost 2p each, but isn’t your heath and the health of this planet the most worthwhile thing to spend your money on? Everything has a cost, and someone must pay somewhere along the line. You pay a little extra for a much better and healthful product. Eating organically is still a fringe lifestyle choice. As it becomes mainstream, the price of organic produce will come down as the volume of it goes up. The volume goes up by consumer demand – so the more you buy, the more the price comes down. You do not have to become a be-dreadlocked vegan who lives in a hut with solar panels and only eats roots (although that would be ideal!), just by making small changes to your buying habits and taking some pride and care in what you eat, you can make a big difference to your own health, the health of our economy and the health of the planet.

If you are a visual learner, and you like a good documentary, I recommend the following:

When you experience love, it is like taking medicine for the first time. As you adjust to the changing presence of love in your heart, you may experience some ‘side effects’- just as you feel the effects when you introduce a new substance to your body. The effects of love are manifold, and some of love’s ‘side effects’ are unexpected and may be a big change from your usual feelings. If love could be bottled – like medicine – and consumed to be experienced, then the bottle should come with these ‘warning labels’ of love’s unexpected side effects:

!WARNING!:When you truly experience love, you may feel like being alone.

When you think of love, you think of sharing love with your partner, family and friends, right? But experiencing love may have the opposite effect on you. Love might cause you to lock your door, unplug your phone, switch off the internet and be non-contactable, even by smoke-signal, if you are adjusting to loving yourself. It is hard to love yourself if you feel that you must constantly be giving yourself to others. To be alone is to look within, to be at peace, and to promote self-knowledge. To be alone is to accept your own company as good company: there is love in that acceptance.

!WARNING!Living with love may make you more aggressive.

Do you think of love as something floaty and passive and saintly? What if I told you that when you choose to experience love, you may start to give a shit about things you’ve never cared about before? When you experience love, the first thing to be cured is apathy. The second thing, is the sense that we are all separate from each other. Don’t be surprised when you welcome love into your heart, you begin to think ‘what can I do to help?’, ‘how can I change this?’, ‘how can I make a difference?’- love feeds your inner eco-warrior, your inner samaritan and your inner Robin Hood.

!WARNING!When you experience love, you may notice spontaneous physical changes in your body.

Do you love doughnuts? Do you love booze? Do you love junk food? When you ramp up the dosage of love in your life, you may not love those things so much. A weird side effect of love is that you may start loving life, your health and yourself too much to still love eating that crap. When you take a new dose of love into your heart, ‘I feel like eating a salad’ may spontaneously run through your mind…just sayin’…

!WARNING!Choosing love may cause you to quit your job.

Love, if you let it, will eventually course through every vein of your life. If you start out doing a job that is on a non-loving vibration, and you subsequently introduce a higher dose of love into your life, you may see, quite frankly, that you job is a waste of what you have to give. You may come to realize that your job does not support your wellness; you may see clearly that it doesn’t support the planet’s wellness. It may dawn on you that your work has fallen out of sync with your soul’s needs. If so, use love’s inspiration to guide you towards what to do to put it right. (This happened to me, I used to work for a credit card company).

!WARNING!Living a life of love may make you re-think your entire life.

Woah! This can be scary…when you begin to live with regular supplements of love, it may cause you to take stock of your whole life. Your life is not compartmentalized, everything has a knock-on-effect on everything else. Love causes you to treat people differently- that in itself can have a massive effect on the quality of experiences in your life. Love wants you to do things that support your wellbeing. Love encourages you towards happiness and peace. Love shoves you in the direction of joy….and the dominos continue to tumble.

!WARNING!Love will make you more self-interested.

To many, love means being selfless, but when you have love in your life, how can you be selfless? You are the facilitator of love by your thoughts, intentions, words and actions. In order to facilitate love, you need to have an understanding of love and to understand love, you need to feel loved…how can you possibly offer something that you have never felt? Not only is it perfectly acceptable for you to receive love, but it is absolutely necessary. Love has the weird side-effect of causing you to cultivate an understanding of love for others by loving yourself.

!WARNING!Love has been known to make people say sorry for their mistakes.

When you love, you don’t need to be right. When you love, you realize that there may be no such thing as ‘right’ because you become more compassionate and understanding of the coherent buoyancy of differing points of view. This may compel you to offer an apology – verbally or mentally but always sincerely – to someone, because through love, you see that contrast, contradiction and variety is fundemental to the overall progress of love. It is not about switching to another side- it is simply that there are no sides, just different expressions and various catalysts for love. Even the ‘bad’ stuff can be a catalyst for love. If you can accept that, then you’ve got the dosage just right.

These have been the seven effects of love that ought to come with a warning label. Can you think of any more?

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Did you know that I have another blog about my adventures in California? If you like sun, surf and spirituality (and food!) come and check it out over at Sun, Spirit and San Diego.

Until Next Time: Give a dose of love to the world twice a day for a week and keep me posted on how you’re doing.